I haven't had sloe gin since my friend Jeni died. She really knew how to make it. She also used to make rumpot -- you get a big stone jar and as each kind of soft fruit comes ripe in the garden in turn, you toss a layer in, with a dose of rum. After the blackberries you seal it up and by Christmas you have this amazing stuff, which she used to bottle in little tiny bottles and give to her friends. Then she'd take the fruit and make it into killer trifle.
Gosh I miss her.
It's not just the rumpot and the long thin Saxon acre of garden full of growing food and hens that she used to garden with an electric wheelchair with tractor treads, it's the way we'd be doing something normal -- taking redcurrants off their stalks or playing Scrabble -- and she'd suddenly be reminded of something amazing she'd done, like helping find the cure for Dutch Elm Disease or smuggling people out of Hungary in the fifties, and she'd just mention it as if it was as ordinary as making honey into mead.
I'm very lucky to have known her. You'd have loved her, and she'd have loved you too, because she'd have really appreciated that spirit of experimentation you have, and the empathy too. You'd have really got on.
Death sucks, but I am very fortunate in my friends.
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Date: 2008-07-26 12:08 pm (UTC)Gosh I miss her.
It's not just the rumpot and the long thin Saxon acre of garden full of growing food and hens that she used to garden with an electric wheelchair with tractor treads, it's the way we'd be doing something normal -- taking redcurrants off their stalks or playing Scrabble -- and she'd suddenly be reminded of something amazing she'd done, like helping find the cure for Dutch Elm Disease or smuggling people out of Hungary in the fifties, and she'd just mention it as if it was as ordinary as making honey into mead.
I'm very lucky to have known her. You'd have loved her, and she'd have loved you too, because she'd have really appreciated that spirit of experimentation you have, and the empathy too. You'd have really got on.
Death sucks, but I am very fortunate in my friends.